This Area

Overview

This handy educational analytic tool is perfect for anyone needing to learn more about their immediate surroundings quickly. This Area will tell you if the population in the surrounding locale is young or old, ethnically diverse, what percent of the homes are owner or renter occupied, the number that house children and teens, and how many homes are vacant, for sale or rent.

Launch the app to find out where you are and what the area is like around you. Get GPS coordinates, altitude, mapped location, nearest street address, and census geography, including census tract and block group number.

Stunning graphics display the age and sex distribution in a population pyramid, with pie charts highlighting the area’s gender, ethnic and racial distributions. Housing numbers report the total, occupied, vacant and occasional use. Included is a glossary of terms from the U.S. Census Bureau with definitions of the measures used in the last decennial census.

Each place the user visits is date and time stamped, with the option of saving and sharing tables and graphs for further study. And with waypoints (i.e., set of coordinates that identify a stopping point), it’s easy to visualize each day’s route.

Educational Uses

Educators in the social sciences will want to incorporate This Area into their Introductory Sociology, Population, Geography, Human Ecology, Applied Demography, Political Science or Community Studies course.  The app is inexpensive and easy enough to learn that students can immediately use it to explore, visualize, document and compare the distribution and differential demographic and housing patterns for small areas anywhere in urban or rural America.

Applied Uses

State, county and city administrators, health and school officials, planners, zoning officers, community organizers, politicians, marketers, real estate agents, commercial developers and prospective homebuyers can all make use of This Area. Anyone can gain a better sense of their immediate surroundings by launching the app to obtain U.S. Census population and housing data for any place they happen to be in the 50 U.S. States and Puerto Rico.

This Area relies on APIs provided by the Census Bureau to retrieve population and housing data for the given block group. The dataset used is the "Summary File 1" for 2010.